::laughing:: I love the park reclamation idea! I also love kiddie pools as an easy watering system. A soaker hose costs $7.99 and a timer is maybe $10. Plus you have them for years. If you use the hose for top-watering it's way more fiddly and takes more daily monitoring than filling the pools does. But if you have the soaker and timer PLUS pools underneath, so the soaker fills the pools, it can be pretty low-maintenance. May not be worth the setup and initial tweaking, though, compared to just filling the pools by hand. BTW, don't FILL the pools :). your plants would drown. I cut holes in my pools about 2" from the bottom, which makes it easy to fill to that depth and lets excess water from rain drain out. In a humid climate, and with small containers, it's not impossible that soaker hoses without reservoirs, e.g. on the roof, could be made to work efficiently. It depends on your tolerance for messing with the system for the first few months :).

I don't know if I could list them all. Off the top of my head, the native plants that I have: Azalea Beauty Berry Dogwoods Downy Phlox Trillium Cuneatum Trillium Decumbens Trillium Erectum Solomon's Seal Bluet Bloodroot Mayapples Columbine Iris Cristata Geranium Heuchera Americana Oxalis violaceae pink, white, and yellow Rue Anemone False Rue Anemone Foamflower Hepatica Asarum Arifolia Fire Pink Indian Pink Iris Cristata purple and white Jack in the Pulpit Oakleaf Hydrangea Viola Walteri Unknown variegated violet Spiderwort Trout Lily Lots of different native ferns Green Eyed Susan Black Eyed Susan Butterfly Weed Blue Shooting Star Coreopsis Honeysuckle Mountain Laurel Ox-Eye Daisy Verbena Wild Petunia Bee Balm Trumpet Vine Cross Vine St. John's Wort Lizard's Tail Green Dragon A great site to look at is www.briartech.com/floweringplants.htm Deb

For the cool weather comming, the greens, lettuce, and kale are easy! Turnips, radish, beet, and carrot. Carrot being the most difficult to be sure it comes up. you can also get onion sets this time of year and simply push the root end of them into the soil a little way and if there is a little bit of moisture in the soil, they will sprout up for you. We often surround our garden beds with onions. Just don't plant peas or beans with onions. Snow peas are good cool weather crop but if we get a hard freeze, it could kill the blooms and set back the harvest so some will recommend planting snow peas for the cool spring season. I'll be planting a bunch of snow peas here soon though since they like warm soil for germination. When we get to spring planting time, get some sweet potatoes started, they will make you think you are a master summer gardener!!! They like the hot and wet and produce a wonderful ground cover over your hole garden to help keep weeds at bay over summer. I've got a lovely bed that has Okra growing tall and sweet potatoes covering the ground and that bed did very well over the heat of summer and will probably continue to do well until it gets cold. Okra, sweet potatoes, southern peas (crowder peas, cow peas, black eye peas), beans, and hot peppers are good hot weather crops to think about for next summer. Get them started in mid spring though so you can get a nice long season of them. Here is a link that might be useful: TCLynx

I'm not judging them all. Just the morons who brought over the invasives lol. :) But I still think that they should be more concerned for their natives, but same can be said for the people here too. I am of European decent. We have only been out of the last dark age for like 50 years. About the time we realized we were killing ourselves with all the pollution and eviromental repercussions. Their are native plant lovers in all those countries who are fighting their own battles. So it's pretty much the same everywhere. We have a member who lives in Sumatra and grows plants. It upsets her to see all the jungles plowed and drained for oil palms, but what can 1 person do by themselves. It comes down to teaching the children for the next generation!